Eric Bristow (6 page)

Booing was something I was going to have to get used to. And I wasn’t shy. I loved the TV cameras being at certain county games. It was good for the game and it gave me a buzz knowing I was on the telly. The first TV tournament I won was again when I was seventeen. It was at the Seashore Holiday Camp in Great Yarmouth, and I was in the amateur tournament. You had to progress through to the last eight to get to play on television the next day. I killed them all. No amateur could touch me. After us was the televised Pro-8 tournament which represented the top eight best darts professionals in the country. I stayed behind for that and as their names were introduced I kept thinking: I’ve beaten him, I’ve beaten him, I’ve killed him, and on it went. I sat there watching players I knew I could beat playing on telly for prize money of up to £1,000 that I could have pocketed. I had practised with some of them before they went on telly and had beaten them easily. These were top professionals who resented being beaten by a young teenage upstart. I had my winnings from the amateur tournament, and they were going to earn something even if they got knocked out first round in the Pro-8. If they started getting cocky with me I’d say to them, ‘Well OK, what we will do is this, if you think you can beat me. Whoever wins the game gets to keep both the cheques.’

I’d look them straight in the eyes and see fear. Then I knew I had them, I knew they were frightened of me, and in 1975 I wasted no time in telling anyone who listened how great I was going to be. I was getting lots of practice and getting better all the time because in between the Super League matches and county games the BDO would organise all these tournaments at holiday camps as well, like the one at Seashore. One of my favourites was at Camber Sands where for one week of the year the whole place would fill up with darts players. I went with my dad and got beaten in the final of the singles. I got £250 for that, and won in the four-man team event for which we each got £100. I’d earned £350 for a week’s work which kept me in beer for a while. On the last day we went home on the train and that night Mum did all our washing, ready for the next morning when we’d be on a train again to another tournament, in Prestatyn.

I always remember Prestatyn because when we got there I met this gypsy boy called Kim Brown, a proper King of the Gypsies sort of bloke, a real hardcase, who was with his mate Chris. He had a tattoo across his neck with the words ‘Cut Here’ on it; they were a rough lot. These two came over to me while I was sitting with my dad having a drink and said, ‘We want you to play this bloke for £500.’

‘What you on about?’ I said. ‘I’ve only got about a hundred and fifty on me.’

But they were adamant. The guy they wanted me to play was called John Parry and he’d never been beaten. ‘We want you to play him for £500,’ they repeated, and they weren’t going to take no for an answer.

‘What happens if I lose this game?’ I said.

‘Nothing,’ they replied.

‘So if I win, you’re going to give me £500, and if I lose the game you’re not bothered?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Right, I’m up for this,’ I said to my dad, rubbing my hands.

But he was worried. ‘You have to be careful here, son, you don’t mess with people like them,’ he warned, and I could see his face lined with anxiety.

‘Nah, I’ll be all right, no problem,’ I said.

I agreed to play this guy the best out of five at 3001. They were long legs. I knew you had to be good to win long legs and no one was as good as me – as I proved. I hammered him three–nil and these gypsies gave me my £500 winnings. I was jubilant and spent the rest of the weekend getting smashed and feeling flush. I then found out that these crafty sods had won £2,500 on it. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

By far the biggest buzz of 1975, however, was when sixty-four of us paid £25 each to play a knockout tournament, with the winner getting all the money plus a three-week trip to America to play in darts tournaments over there with fifty-four other Brits who were making
the
trip. I
had
to win that tournament, and did, fairly easily, beating Alan Glazier in the final, scooping the dough and a return ticket to the States in the process.

This was to be my first taste of a jet-set lifestyle that was going to dictate my life over the next three decades. There were three tournaments to play over three weeks: one in Los Angeles, one in ’Frisco and another in Vallejo. The first words my dad said to me when I won were: ‘I’m coming with you.’ I was only seventeen. He wanted to look after me and keep me on the straight and narrow, so he borrowed some money and off we went. Some of the players I had beaten to get there also flew over, but they had to fund their own trip. I had my tickets paid plus $800 to spend from the money I’d won. When we arrived in LA all the darts community who lived there put us up in different houses.

Dad and I were with a couple called Malcolm and Mary-Ann Harper who had a beautiful big house with a swimming pool; I’d never seen anything like it in my life. And if the houses dwarfed the ones I’d seen at home, the darts tournaments, which were played from Friday to Sunday, were something else. There were hundreds of boards lined up and hundreds of players playing singles, pairs, mixed pairs, four-man teams, and all for money.

As the tournament progressed, and as more players got knocked out, so more of these boards became free. I was practising on one of these boards when a
top
player called Nicky Virachkul, originally from Thailand but with American status, said to me, ‘So, you’re the London Lip are you? So you think you’re better than me, do you?’ and all this verbal nonsense – this was before I was known as the Crafty Cockney; back then I was called lots of names, not all of them good.

I said, ‘Look, you don’t want to play me for money, you’re not good enough to play me for money.’

My dad was at the side going, ‘Leave it out, son; we’ve only just got here.’

He was too late. I agreed to play Nicky for $200, and Dad said, ‘No, no, no, we’ve only got eight hundred.’ His face had gone white at this point.

‘Don’t panic, Dad,’ I said. ‘I’ll beat him.’

I played him best of fifteen at 501, and I beat him eight–one. My dad was elated.

Then Nicky said, ‘I’ll play you again, same format, same amount of money.’

Again Dad became anxious. ‘Nah, don’t play him again,’ he said. He’d got the money and he was happy.

Nicky didn’t have the cash on him so he went round his mates and raised the two hundred dollars, came back to me and said, ‘Come on, I’ll play you again.’

So I played him again and won eight legs to five. Now, instead of $800 dollars, we had $1,200, and we’d hardly started the three-week trip. Dad kept hold of the money. There was no point me having it because I could hardly
buy
anything there. I couldn’t order drinks for a start because you had to be twenty-one and over to do that. So I got drinks sneaked to me: cokes with vodka in, that sort of thing.

I won the singles in Los Angeles and was runner-up in the four-man team which included Leighton Rees. Then we all packed our bags and headed for ’Frisco where we weren’t put up by anyone but had to get hotels. This didn’t bother Dad and me because by then we were loaded, and we got more loaded as the fortnight progressed because I won the singles in ’Frisco and was only beaten in the final in Vallejo.

It was great, one of the best three weeks of my life, but by far the biggest eye-opener for me was the American women. They were nuts, especially one group of about forty or fifty women, most of whom were married to rich Americans, but who used to spend the three weeks hopping from tournament to tournament and having sex with as many British darts players as they could get their hands on. They’d all meet up and mark their conquests out of ten. The Brits always got marked down. Most of them got one out of ten. We could hear them in the tournament bar talking about how good or bad a shag we were.

It didn’t take me long to get into them. I’d be shagging this woman one night and the next night drinking with her husband. It was so free and easy it felt weird compared to the stuffiness and sexual backwardness of
seventies
England. I’d get women coming on to me and I’d be thinking: Hold on a minute, love, you’re married; I just played your husband and beat him earlier on. The next minute I’d be shagging her and the following night I’d be going out for a meal with her and her old man, but I was seventeen and it was simply a case of ‘Whatever.’ At that age you get it where you can. I don’t know if I got one out of ten, but then again, I didn’t give a monkey’s.

Everybody was at it, including players like Bobby George, who got caught out one night. It was in an LA hotel on a Friday night. We were all on a board, practising, and I could see this blonde woman eyeing up Bobby, and he was eyeing her up too. After a while the boys and I noticed he had disappeared. He was due to play and everybody was looking for him. Suddenly he appeared and he was soaking, absolutely dripping wet. Five minutes later the blonde appeared and she was sodden as well. Bobby sidled up to a group of us and whispered, ‘You won’t believe this, lads: I was out there giving her one on the hotel lawn and the sprinklers came on. We got soaked. They were everywhere these things, we couldn’t escape them.’

The rest of us were in stiches, trying to picture Bobby desperately trying to pull his pants up as the water hit him. But this woman’s husband wasn’t laughing. He had obviously twigged what had happened and was giving Bobby the eyeballs from across the room. I made it
worse
by shouting, ‘Bob, do you want a drink? Nah, you look like you’ve had one already, mate.’

From that first American trip I came home with a very special memento. There was a bar in Santa Monica owned by an English bloke called Les. He was a millionaire who lived on Hollywood Boulevard and he had three all-you-can-eat delis to go with this pub – the darts boys loved these delis and boy could they eat. Les loved having us Brits over and would organise a party at his house for us all. In his bar he had all these shirts lined up that you could buy. They had pictures on the back and different names. I was attracted to a bright red shirt that had a picture of a policeman on it and a Union Flag. Emblazoned across it were the words Crafty Cockney. It just seemed appropriate to what I represented. The Cockney equated to my London roots and Crafty fitted because I was a cocky little so and so. So I brought five of them back home with me, went on telly wearing one and the rest is history. Those shirts were probably the best things I have ever bought.

The pub was not so lucky. It was sold to an Indian guy who called it the Londoner; then it was knocked down, and now all that remains is a car park. Les’s story is also tragic. After selling up he moved to Canada and made even more money, but his wife ended up killing herself. He found her in the car on his drive with a hosepipe attached to the exhaust. To be fair she was a bit of a scatterbrain and wasn’t all there in the head. He
ended
up moving to Mexico. I saw him recently, and he gave me a Crafty Cockney leather jacket.

I said to him, ‘What a lovely present.’

‘That’ll be £150,’ he replied.

What a cheeky sod. This is a bloke who is a multi-millionaire. I paid him for it.

There were lots of English pubs in Santa Monica and every bar we went in had these Crafty Cockney style shirts. All the darts lads loved these bars because you could get things like fish and chips, and on Sundays they did roast beef and Yorkshire puds. It was just like being at home.

That was my first taste of America. I went there with my dad, we had $800, and we came back with a lot more. For three weeks I was completely off the rails. How I won two out of three tournaments I’ll never know, it was crackers, but one thing was for certain: I had played on a much bigger stage than anywhere back at home, played the best players from all over the globe, and I had stuffed them. It was time to take the next step up the ladder.

FOUR

England

IN DARTING TERMS
I was a freak. Most darts players mature in their late twenties to early thirties, but everything happened for me when I was a teenager. There were other good young players around, but none of them were a patch on me. I was making money from darts, spending it as fast as I made it, and all the time I was on the road playing tournament after tournament, then coming home with packets of fags and crates of Guinness for my nan. There was none of this saving up lark. There were so few people at my age with a pocketful of money and the chance to see the world that I just wasn’t going to let it slip by. You have all these people who work all their lives, they save up their pensions and tell everyone that when they retire they’re going to travel. Half of them don’t even make it to retirement age and the ones that do tend to have health problems so they hardly leave the country. My philosophy was formed when I was seventeen and starting to
be
successful at darts: I was going to enjoy it while it lasted and sod the future. To a certain extent I still live to that philosophy today.

I lived for the here and now, and at that time darts was getting bigger by the month. Tournaments were being televised all over the place and TV bosses couldn’t get enough of us. There was the World Masters, and Butlins Grand Masters which was in Birmingham; Anglia TV covered a tournament at the Seashore Holiday Village in Caister; all of a sudden there were about fifteen tournaments all attracting good viewing figures and with relatively good prize money on offer. In between there were the non-televised events which were still attractive, with decent payouts. Then there was the annual American three-week beano, which was basically party time, followed by Opens in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. By the time I was eighteen I was a full-time darts player who would look at his diary on the first of January and see that eighty days had been filled already with tournaments, and that was without pencilling in the exhibitions where the majority of the money was made. Also, I still had to play Super League on Mondays to get my ranking points.